Apple had announced at last week’s special event that the new third generation i Pod Touch is up to 50% faster than the 2nd generation iPod Touch and includes support for OpenGL ES 2.0, which will improve performance, especially while playing i Phone games.

Macworld’s tests show some impressive gains. Boot went down from 31 to 19 seconds. Launching apps went from 12, 20, and 10 seconds to 7, 15, and 5 for Peggle, HR Battle, and Rolando 2 respectively. Web page rendering for the NYT site was down from 34 to 15 seconds, and the Sunspider JS test went from 34.2 to 15.6 seconds.

TU-AW, meanwhile, went to the heart of the matter, and discovered that the new i Pod touch shares similar, if slightly incremented internals over this year’s iPhone 3GS. More plainly, same Sam sung ARM Cortex A8 processor (S5L8922X, however, as opposed to the i Phone 3GS S5L8920X). No word yet on what may be different, if anything about the PowerVR SGX graphic core, but as we heard already, the 802.11n potential is in the WiFi chip.

The second generation i Pod touch was faster than the i Phone 3G, so it’s not hard to imagine lack of cell-radio concerns and slightly new components could push the third generation i Pod touch across the finish line before the i Phone 3GS as well.